If Nature’s a Generous Benefactor, a Girl Can’t Help Sharing Her Gifts

Christian Borle and Rachel York in the Encores! production of the musical "Little Me."CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

If it is possible to leer sweetly, then that’s what they’re doing this weekend at City Center, where a likable if long-winded production of “Little Me” is running through Sunday. The Encores! concert revival of this 1962 musical manages to wipe the smirk off the face of a show about the rise and rise of a woman whose greatest assets are her mammary glands.

Her name? Belle Poitrine, a handle guaranteed to elicit snickers among those who have beginners’ French under their belts. But as charmingly incarnated here by Rachel York, as the dewy younger version, and Judy Kaye, as the worldly older creature she becomes, Belle has a straight-ahead sincerity that makes her pretty much impervious to prurience.

The same, improbably enough, might be said of everyone and everything around her, including all the drooling men in Belle’s life. These are mostly played with contagious good nature by Christian Borle, late of “Smash,” the television series about a musical about another, famously well-endowed blonde, Marilyn Monroe. Broadway would seem to have a thing for peroxide and large cup sizes.

There, you see. It’s hard to keep your mind out of the gutter, or at least the lingerie department, when discussing “Little Me,” which features songs by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh and a nouveau-Catskills script by a young wisecracker just beginning to make his name in the early 1960s, Neil Simon. But somehow, as staged by John Rando as the opener in what promises to be an especially juicy City Center Encores! season, “Little Me” often feels fresh and funny in ways that do not make you want to slap it.

Neither fabled flop nor template-making blockbuster, “Little Me” retains a special place in the heart of musical-comedy cultists, as one of those shows that surely deserved better that it got. The original version, which starred Sid Caesar and ran for a disappointing 257 performances, was probably a casualty of competition from two other cheerfully dirty-minded shows that year, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”

You can see why Broadway aficionados refuse to give up on “Little Me.” Its script, adapted from a novel by Patrick Dennis, is a spoof of the bogusly modest celebrity biography, a genre that has only multiplied on American best-seller lists. And the Coleman and Leigh songs exude a brassy verve, equal parts cynicism and sentimentality, that has guaranteed their enduring afterlife in cabarets.

But the show also always suffered from an identity crisis, a condition that became evident whenever anyone tried to revive it. As Mr. Simon wrote it, “Little Me” was essentially a showcase for the comic versatility — or at least indefatigability — of Mr. Caesar.

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Rachel York, center, in "Little Me."CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

A borscht belt-bred comedian (and onetime boss of Mr. Simon’s), whose blackout-sketch shows hijacked American television audiences, Mr. Caesar appeared as a whopping eight of Belle’s boys, from a French music-hall star and a sickly European prince to the boy from the right side of the tracks whom the lowly born Belle always, truly loved, at least as much as she was able.

So was “Little Me” too sketch-driven for the age of the organic musical? Was its pneumatic heroine, with her role divided between two actresses, too much of a walking punch line to hold our sympathy? A 1982 revival disastrously divided Mr. Caesar’s roles between two stars, Victor Garber and James Coco. The 1998 Roundabout Theater Company version returned to the idea of a single actor (blessedly, it was Martin Short) but had both young and old Belle portrayed by one performer (an uncomfortable Faith Prince).

The Encores! incarnation goes back to the show’s original form, if not its spirit. I wasn’t around to see Mr. Caesar conquer in “Little Me,” but I’ve caught enough of his television performances on video to imagine the sort of timing and chutzpah he must have brought to it. And I did see Mr. Short, another veteran of television sketch comedy, who gave a juggernaut performance.

Mr. Borle, who won a Tony playing the ineffectually villainous Black Stache in “Peter and the Starcatcher,” has a looser, less aggressive comic presence. Mr. Short and (I presume) Mr. Caesar gave the impression of being perpetually coiled in readiness to pounce on whatever joke came their way. Mr. Borle has a more casual relationship with his material; he sidles up to caricature. And rather than smashing corny and vulgar shtick into the audience, he gives it a gentle, goofy topspin.

That sensibility shifts, or at least diffuses, the show’s center. This “Little Me” makes Belle — both of her — as worthy of our attention as the slapstick-prone men who fall for her (in more ways than one). Though a cousin of the American musical’s greatest gold digger, Lorelei Lee of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Belle isn’t nearly as complete or endearing a comic portrait.

But Ms. Kaye, as the Belle who recounts her life to a pet biographer (David Garrison), authoritatively combines earthiness and stateliness. Ms. York inventively modulates the surface of a superficial part by investing it with the sheen of Joan Crawford, the movie star who embodied so many rags-to-riches fantasies on screen with her determined smile and ravenous eyes. (In the show’s musical high point, its title song, these two Belles perform in gloriously knowing harmony.)

The supporting cast is so packed with veteran talent — including Harriet Harris (hilarious), Lee Wilkof, Lewis J. Stadlen and Tony Yazbeck (who does an athletically sexy rendition of the great, finger-snapping “I’ve Got Your Number)” — that you expect it to burst wide open. But Mr. Rando keeps scenery chewing to a minimum. And the show has an affable effortlessness as it snakes and swoops through the years of one woman’s life.

With Rob Berman conducting, and Ralph Burns’s original orchestrations lovingly reassembled, the Encores! Orchestra gives full due to the shiny layers of Coleman’s diverse and peppy score. The corps de ballet, choreographed by Joshua Bergasse, dances, with varying results, in an ambitious variety of styles.

The show has been designed — by a team that includes John Lee Beatty (scenic consultant) and Ken Billington (lighting) — with a shorthand sumptuousness that uses giant picture postcards to signal changes of scene. But this “Little Me” feels less like a series of colorful postcards then one long, slightly meandering love letter to a comic sensibility that was beginning to go out of fashion even 50 years ago. As such, it’s well worth adding to your scrapbook of musical memories.

Little Me

Book by Neil Simon; lyrics by Carolyn Leigh; music by Cy Coleman; based on the novel by Patrick Dennis; directed by John Rando; choreography by Joshua Bergasse; sets by John Lee Beatty; costumes by Paul Tazewell; lighting by Ken Billington; sound by Scott Lehrer; concert adaptation by Jack Viertel; music coordinator, Seymour Red Press; original orchestrations by Ralph Burns; production stage manager, Jason Hindelang. Presented by New York City Center, Arlene Shuler, president; Mr. Viertel, artistic director; Mark Litvin, managing director; Rob Berman, music director. At the City Center, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan; 212-581-1212, nycitycenter.org. Through Sunday. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: If Nature’s a Generous Benefactor, a Girl Can’t Help Sharing Her Gifts. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe